Ged Carroll

Category: marketing | 營銷 | 마케팅 | マーケティング

According to the AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. This has contained a wide range of content as a section over the years including

  • Super Bowl advertising
  • Spanx
  • Content marketing
  • Fake product reviews on Amazon
  • Fear of finding out
  • Genesis the Korean luxury car brand
  • Guo chao – Chinese national pride
  • Harmony Korine’s creative work for 7-Eleven
  • Advertising legend Bill Bernbach
  • Japanese consumer insights
  • Chinese New Year adverts from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
  • Doughnutism
  • Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
  • Influencer promotions
  • A media diary
  • Luxe streetwear
  • Consumerology by marketing behaviour expert Phil Graves
  • Payola
  • Dettol’s back to work advertising campaign
  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders
  • Dove #washtocare advertising campaign
  • The fallacy of generations such as gen-z
  • Cultural marketing with Stüssy
  • How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp
  • Facebook’s misleading ad metrics
  • The role of salience in advertising
  • SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? advertising campaign
  • Brand winter
  • Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting
  • Lovemarks
  • How Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer’s needs and tastes
  • Korean TV shopping celebrity Choi Hyun woo
  • qCPM
  • Planning and communications
  • The Jeremy Renner store
  • Cashierless stores
  • BMW NEXTGen
  • Creativity in data event that I spoke at
  • Beauty marketing trends
  • Kraft Mothers Day marketing
  • RESIST – counter disinformation tool
  • Facebook pivots to WeChat’s business model
  • Smartphone launches

  • Oculus + more news

    Oculus Founder: Rift will come to Mac if Apple “ever releases a good computer” | Ars Technica – indicates its basically a very top end gaming machine minimum requirement for Oculus. It also indicates that there will not widespread adoption any time soon. State-of-the-art games consoles don’t cut it either according to Oculus. It means that the bar for content creation will also be very high for Oculus type devices which will have a negative effect on adoption. It will take a while to move Oculus style experience to a wireless device that would allow free movement. Expect at least one VR winter before Oculus type experiences are ready consumer adoption, if there is sufficient volumes of compelling content created

    Marketers Flock to Programmatic Ads Despite Concerns About Fraud and Transparency – WSJ – 79% of advertisers have made programmatic ad buys over the past year. That is up significantly from a similar study that was done in 2014, which found only 35% of the advertisers had used programmatic buying – relatively small sample size of 128 respondents via Forrester Research. Forrester also don’t seem to understand that role that programmatic would play in a media mix and the marketing science for, and against over-personalisation / targeting. It also has implications for businesses in terms of the burden of data that they have to handle (paywall)

    Amazon Quietly Removes Encryption Support from its Gadgets | Motherboard – While Apple is fighting the FBI in court over encryption, Amazon quietly disabled the option to use encryption to protect data on its Android-powered devices. Amazon devices look very similar to Chinese brands in this regards. They’re probably bought by value orientated consumers and it positions privacy as a luxury good. All of which should be a cause of concern for consumers in the medium to long term

  • Advertising isn’t the problem, telecoms are

    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad blockers, at least not the sole problem. A few days ago I explained why I thought that tracking was the problem that ad blockers are designed to deal with. From a consumer point-of-view the time it takes to load a page is unacceptable for a significant minority of internet users.

    This comes at a time when mobile telecommunications services have become commoditised. For £29/month I get unlimited data, unlimited SMS texts, unlimited voice, free roaming across a number of countries around the world and 8GB of data when my phone is used as a modem for a laptop.

    So how could a mobile carrier upsell me? The answer lies in going back to the late 1990s. In the UK, there used to be a mobile carrier called one2one. The service provider had a poor network, but needed to engage with business users and tech forward consumers. They did this with series of tariffs under the Precept brand. These tariffs had a couple of differentiated services in common:

    • A shorter gap between replacement handsets
    • A priority and normal number, so that you could prioritise callers
    • Improved voice quality using a better Codec called Enhanced Full Rate or EFR

    Move forward the best part of two decades – handsets are now affordable to be purchased upfront for tech forward consumers, though Apple and Samsung looking to duplicate the car leasing model in the US. They are likely to roll it out internationally at some point.

    The equivalent of priority numbers is multiple identities or accounts, differentiation that steps out of the mobile provider remit and into services provided via applications, for instance multiple email addresses.

    Voice calls are becoming increasingly disinter-mediated through OTT messaging services.  But ad-blocking on the network level offer a clear analog to the deployment of EFR, providing faster page load times for web content.

    There are also benefits in terms of network utilisation and bandwidth capacity. This is especially important in countries like the UK where it is nigh on impossible to get planning permission for mobile masts due to consumer protests. But the most attractive part of ad blocking at the network is the product differentiation it affords mobile providers.

    More information

    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers | renaissance chambara
    UK Gov’t Launches Anti-Adblocking Initiative, Compares It To Piracy | Slashdot
    Three Group to tackle excessive and irrelevant mobile ads | Three UK media centre
    One 2 One offers free daytime calls and souped-up GSM | V3
    The UK’s £150m Mobile Infrastructure Project “not as successful as envisaged” | TelecomTV

  • Ad blockers

    If you work in the advertising or media sectors, the elephant in the room will be the problem ad blockers. Specially developed software designed to stop ad tracking and ad vending online.
    ad blocker
    Over five years from 2010 to 2015 the installed base of ad blockers has increased eight-fold. The root problem is a that of a poor web experience. It is a well known heuristic since the late 1990s that page load time and the likelihood of a consumer to click away to another page have inverse relationship with each other.
    page load times

    Can it be the ads themselves?

    Display ads have been around almost as long as the commercial web.

    Secondly, Google research found that 56.1 per cent of display ads vended in a trial were not viewable by the audience.

    But that number is a problem for advertising customers as they want to get greater efficiency and effectiveness in their marketing campaigns.

    Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed went on record last year demanding 100% viewability for digital advertising. In order to support this, there needs to be tracking technology deployed to monitor the advertising experience.

    This is on top of tracking technology that is used to conduct retargeting and aid programmatic selling of advertising. All of this slows page load times as information is conveyed to a plethora tracking servers, which then controls which ads are served.

    Retargeting is a tool that is particularly crudely used, audiences aren’t that impressed by brands stalking them throughout their online journey. More media related content can be found here.

    More information

    IAB: 100% Viewability of Digital Ads Is ‘Not Yet Possible’ | Advertising Age
    5 Factors of Display Visibility | Think With Google (US)
    The Future of Viewability | 360i
    CPM is dead: a guide to viewability in online advertising | Econsultancy GooglePlus account
    Measuring Ad Viewability | Think With Google
    Why viewability will become one of the key issues in digital advertising in 2016 | The Drum
    State of Viewability Transaction 2015 | iab
    Unilever’s Keith Weed: ‘Digital ads must be 100% viewable’ | Marketing Week
    Ad Blockers and the Next Chapter of the Internet | HBR – retargeting blamed (hat tip Daniel Appelquist)

  • MWC 2016 as a case study on talkability, brand mentions and brand performance

    Mobile World Congress (or in industry parlance MWC 2016) is where the telecoms industry goes to set out its stand. It has gradually changed from being a conference where the big issues of the day are hashed out, to more of a trade show a la CES or CeBIT.

    From a brand point of view, it was of interest to me for two reasons:

    • It offers largely culture neutral brand discussions, many of which occur online
    • I have an interest, having worked on a few mobile brands during my agency career (Palm, Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Samsung, Qualcomm, Telenor Myanmar and Huawei)

    I pulled this slide ware together for a talk I am giving at an internal event at an agency.

    The first data that I have put together is looking at the amount of mentions that occurred regardless of the channel. It is a relatively easy data point to pull out of monitoring systems very quickly.

    Obviously the value of mentions will depend on how many people view them, what is the context that the mention appears in. What was the content around it? Who said it, are they expert or trustworthy? So looking purely at the number of mentions would be crude, offering little value apart from nice PowerPoint slides.

    Breaking the mentions down by platform gives an idea of relative marketing communications competencies of brands. So looking at Huawei and Xiaomi shows contrasting approach to building talkability and conversations. Huawei focuses on traditional media channels where as Xiaomi focuses on social.

    By comparison LG and Samsung seem to have a more holistic approach.

    I then moved on beyond the mention data to try and look at relative authority of whoever mentioned the brand and looking at the relative distribution by brand and channel.

    I had done some initial analysis on the event in general here. These numbers showed how well brands had built high authority communities and the discussions around them.

    What was quite surprising was the polarised authority of mainstream media sources. Newswire syndication had destroyed authority of many online traditional media channels. A second cross brand observation was the relatively low authority of the blogosphere.

    These slides only start to delve into understanding talkability and are time consuming to create in comparison to looking at raw mention numbers, but offer superior strategic insight for both earned and paid media approaches for future launches.

    I did some broad profiling of online conversations around MWC here.

  • Come to Singapore + more

    Come to Singapore

    Come to Singapore! The Sights (And Branding) Are Lovely | WIRED – it feels very Monocle-esque in terms of editorial style. Come to Singpore! is very different to the Conde Naste Traveller type editorial. Singapore is aiming at developing a start-up culture so targetingWired (US) readers make a good deal of sense. More Singapore related posts here.

    Decline of cyberspace

    William Gibson on the decline of cyberspace. It is fascinating in terms of how Gibson’s inspiration has evolved over time. He was reacting against genres that he didn’t want to write as much as ideas he wanted to convey. The ability to say no, is a very interesting creative process and it reminds me of an interview I saw with an Apple executive talking about why the iPod didn’t have an FM radio.

    Renault Alpine Vision

    Interesting to see Renault going back to Alpine’s sports roots with the Vision sports coupe. It is made to a similar formula to the original 1960s cars that made Alpine famous. A light, small car, a rear-mid engine placement with a highly tuned small capacity engine. Performance is viewed by the Alpine team in much more holistically with an equal focus on handling and breaking.

    Tesla Model X

    I am a sucker for well done manufacturing and process films. The first one up is from Tesla, highlighting robots working in a manufacturing cell on their X model vehicle. Tesla has had problems around areas like panel fit. I am not sure if they have resolved those quality issues, but robots should provide them with a very consistent process and higher throughput.